Stupid Republicans

Ron Paul says the legions of newcomers his presidential campaign brought to the Republican Party are getting the cold shoulder from John McCain and from the party.

The Texas congressman says neither he nor his supporters have heard from Mr. McCain or Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan since March 4, when the Arizona senator accumulated enough delegates to clinch the party’s presidential nomination.

“I don’t think they want them,” Mr. Paul told The Washington Times, adding that indifference doesn’t surprise him because the party’s establishment has deserted traditional conservative principles for big government and foreign intervention.

“We don’t agree with them,” he says. “We agree with the Old Right, and they’re the New Right, which is ‘The Wrong,’ [because] the New Right has morphed into neoconservative.”

Many of his 800,000 presidential nomination votes were from newcomers to the Republican Party — the kind of dedicated small-donor volunteers the party needs, he says.

Mr. Duncan says he informed Mr. Paul that Mr. McCain had gone over the top on delegates but did not discuss how the party might hold onto Mr. Paul’s supporters — and their potential future financial contributions.

Why the GOP would be shunning a group that is both dedicated and willing to work is beyond me. At the local and state level, ideology barely matters what’s needed are warm bodies and Ron Paul has that in droves:

He estimates his e-mail list of committed supporters alone would account for about 10 percent of the Republican electorate and could move mountains, if they choose to stay in the party and work to change it the way evangelicals and Catholics changed it, beginning in the Ronald Reagan era.

Predicting that neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Obama will pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, he sees little difference among the candidates in either party because they all have accepted in one way or another America’s playing the costly role of sole surviving empire in the world.

In the end, he wants to be able to say that he and his supporters “revitalized interest in the concept of personal liberty. It is the instrument that made America the greatest country ever — and we’re about to lose it.”

Memo to the GOP: Not every Ron Paul supporter is a nut or 9/11 truther. Some of them might actually be able to helpyou. And, this year, you need all the help you can get.

One Response to “Stupid Republicans”

Our Party, in general, is terrible at welcoming new supporters. Local committees are most often, down right xenophobic.

The good news is that the Republican Party is beginning to pass leadership at the state and unit level along to a group of younger, more outgoing, gentlemen.

Here in Henrico, our Chairman (and local Sheriff) Mike Wade (not to be confused with the other Mike Wade in the Third District), has been doing a superb job of welcoming the Paulistinians who have been attending our meetings (First Saturday of each month at “The Place” at Innsbrook at 8:00 AM).

All of our Committees need to do more to reach out to Asian and Latino voters. I think that when our State Convention is concluded, we will finally see a new focus on recruiting new citizens to join the GOP here in Virginia.

As for the Paulistinians supporting McCain, I don’t see that happening, not now, or ever. A few might hold their nose and cast their vote for the only Republican on the ballot, but nearly every Paulistinian who I know, feels no loyalty to McCain. It is ironic that early in his career, McCain was the champion of limited government and made big headlines as he tried to end wasteful government programs. Now, the Paulistinians and many other Republicans see McCain as a typical double-talking Neocon, who wants to trash our Constitutional rights in order to perpetuate this contrivance; this undeclared war on terror.

I expect that John McCain will be our next President, but I also anticipate that the afternoon of the inauguration, Republicans will suffer a massive, nationwide case of “buyer’s remorse” when they collectively realize that we will likely have four more years of Bush-style foreign policy blunders, accompanied by a deeper slide into our next Great Depression.

But what a terrible alternative we have in Billary or Senator clueless, Obama. No matter what, we are all in for a terribly rough four years.

It is not for lack of a sales pitch that Paulistinians will refrain from supporting McCain, it is the wholesale unsuitability of the candidate in the eyes of most libertarian-leaning Republicans.